It was almost religious.

Naush had never realized how long a smile could linger on one’s mind. Light travels by 299,792,458 meters per second; however long the grin lasted, it would’ve been barely an evanescent moment of the past. They were standing 0.7 meters apart, but the curved up corner of the boy’s lips and a stolen, glowing glance struck Naush miles away from where he stood, cast him isolated on a never-treaded high ground where thin atmosphere and the tender breeze kept all the moving souls and irrelevant noises out of the horizon. Naush’s heart must’ve skipped a beat.

The clarity and purity. It was almost religious.

How could all this happen within a milli- or even a nanosecond? Apparently, the brain works differently than physics. Each slice of the time-space continuum during their encounter was printed, framed, and hung up on the wall Naush passed by every instance of his day. It was a casual scratch on the shoulder, a near-perfect angle from the side of the face, an inconsequential match of each’s pupils, his slightly tilted head, them leaning towards the gravity of each other, and most of all, his harmless, friendly, tingling beam. So how long could a smile last?

Naush was not religious, but the moment almost was.